[Sugar-devel] Sharing in Terminal

[Sayamindu Dasgupta]

On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 8:09 AM, Benjamin M. Schwartz
<bmschwar at fas.harvard.edu> wrote:
> Sayamindu Dasgupta wrote:
>> Hello,
>> While going through  Ben Schwartz's Shared Term feature proposal
>> discussion page
>> (http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Talk:Features/Terminal_Sharing), I
>> started to wonder if we could somehow implement "readonly" mode for
>> sharing in the Terminal activity.
>> After a weekend of hacking : I have managed to come up with the following:
>
> I like it.  A read-only mode is definitely useful, albeit in a very
> different way from a shared interactive terminal.  I couldn't figure out a
> way to grab the text from the terminal, so I ended up implementing Watch
> Me, which provides the same functionality (and much more general
> functionality), but in a much less efficient and integrated way.
>
> There are some UI things that will need to be worked out.  Most obviously,
> the hidden split-screen is currently totally non-discoverable.  I also
> think that N-to-N sharing might be more generally useful.  For example, it
> could use the Terminal's tabs mechanism to show one tab for each user to
> all users.  Perhaps both modes could be subsumed into one by providing a
> button for each user to show or hide her terminal.
>

> I can't tell from your e-mail what is working, exactly.  I think it's
> important that TUIs like nano and less work properly, as far as possible.
>  For users with different screen or font sizes, some difficulty is inevitable.

Thanks for the feedback. I checked with Nano and VIM and they render
fine (though a small problem is that the "action" is often hidden from
view as the initial text manipulation happens in the top of the
screen, which remains out of the viewport in the shared terminal
view). I like your ideas on utilizing the tab mechanism for N-N
sharing, since at the moment, the sharing happens blindly in 1->N
fashion from the first tab only, which I think is a bit clumsy.

I think I'll propose read only shared terminal as a feature for 0.88
Thanks again,
Sayamindu

-- 
Sayamindu Dasgupta
[http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings]